TERRAFORMING TERRA
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Saturday, June 7, 2014

More Messages from the Dead

Here is some
more data on the common immediate contact with a recently deceased member of
one’s circle. The surprise is that it is
vastly more common to the point of stating it is universal but often unreported
or unidentified.

What is true
is that we have no need to expect much from an individual in the spirit form,
or at least no more than they presented alive.
You do not suddenly become well informed or better engaged with
available circumstance. I also suspect
that you are parked pending a next trip around the block.

I bring this
up because we were conflating angels and spirits as possibly the same. Yet one is a guide and the other is the
guided. It also is obvious that humanity
needs plenty of guidance and we are still in the early stages of the human
spiritual evolution. Most today still
deny the soul, let alone a spiritual existence.

Messages
from the dead: The drowned son who returns for bedside chats. The astronaut who
spoke to his father's ghost. Impossible? This spine-tingling series may make
you think again

Thought death was clear but? A new book,
Opening Heaven's Door, will callenge your views. In the second part of our
serialisation, bereaved people recall visits by dead loved ones, writes

PATRICIA PEARSON

Research in Wales, Japan, Australia and the
U.S. shows that between 40 and 53¿¿¿¿per cent of the bereaved receive some kind
of signal or visitation when someone close to them dies.

A humid night in summer. Ellie Black wakes
at around 3am and her eyes focus on a figure at the end of her bed. It’s her
father, from whom she’s long been estranged. Now fully alert, she watches him
as he tips his hat and bows with a flourish. Then he’s gone.

The following morning she relates the
experience to her daughter at the breakfast table. Later that day the phone
rings — with news that her father died in the early hours.
A tall story? Not at all.

TELEPATHY

Research in Wales, Japan, Australia and
the U.S. shows that between 40 and 53 per cent of the bereaved receive some
kind of signal or visitation when someone close to them dies. [
so much for any special claim to rarity.
It is nothing of the sort – arclein ]]

Usually they sense a presence; sometimes
they actually see or hear one. Psychiatrists have labelled these experiences
‘grief hallucinations’, though they have not yet been studied
neurologically.

In 2012, the psychologist Erlendur
Haraldsson published a comprehensive study he’d done on 340 cases of
extraordinary encounters with the dying.

Usually people encountered their fathers
or mothers — suggesting that the parental impulse to connect and reassure
continues past death.

About a quarter of his subjects saw or heard
the dead person at the hour of death or within the day it occurred. In 86
per cent of these cases, they weren’t yet aware of the death by ordinary means.

Some surveys report that about half of
all these telepathic experiences occur in dreams. A musician, Rory McGill,
told me that on the night his father died, he had a vivid dream in which he
climbed onto his father’s bed and held him in his arms. ‘But in an instant, I
was standing alone in the room — he was gone, and the bed was empty and neatly
made,’ he recalled.

The next day, his mother phoned: his father
had died unexpectedly while Rory was dreaming about him. A mere coincidence?
Highly unlikely. A review of ‘spontaneous telepathy’ studies concludes that the
odds against chance are 22 billion to one.

So, do we have a form of consciousness — a
way of knowing — that has yet to be fully explained?

Intriguingly, studies of twins separated by distance seem to confirm that
something odd is going on.

One of the first of these studies monitored
the electrical impulses of the twins¿ brains. The scientists found that when
one twin was asked to close his or her eyes, which causes the brain¿s alpha
rhythms to increase, the distant twin¿s alpha rhythms also increased.

Many later twin studies had similar
findings. In 2013, a study of British twins reported that 60 per cent felt
they’d had telepathic exchanges. Among identical twins, 11 per cent said
they had frequent exchanges with their sibling, including shared dreams.

Other studies of telepathy by University of
Virginia psychiatrist Ian Stevenson explored how people could know that someone
physically distant was dying or in distress. Stevenson started by analysing 165
meticulously researched historical cases. Nearly 90 per cent had
occurred, he discovered, when the person was awake, rather than asleep or
dozing.

Two-thirds involved news of an immediate family
member. Eighty-two per cent involved death, a sudden illness or
accident.

But people did not, apparently, pick up on
one another’s good tidings.

‘Is it that the communication of joy has no
survival value for us, while the communication of distress does?’ Stevenson
wondered.

He then moved on to 35 contemporary
cases. And one startling conclusion from these was that a third involved
violent death.

His findings were replicated in 2006, when
Icelandic researchers found a dramatically higher number of abrupt or violent
deaths in telepathic cases.

In addition, there were many accounts from
both World Wars of a soldier’s family or loved one suddenly waking in the still
of the night. In that instant, they knew the soldier had died — and a telegram
later arrived to confirm this. Perhaps, Stevenson mused, there was something in
the emotional quality of the event — a thunderclap of fear or pain — that
carried like a sound wave across water.

In more than half of the cases, the person
who received the message was driven to take some kind of action — such as
making a phone call, embarking on a frantic trip or changing holiday plans.

One woman drove 50 miles home in the middle
of the night after suddenly gleaning that her teenage daughter was in trouble.
It turned out their house had been broken into by armed intruders, with the
daughter inside.

But how do you know that the news you’ve
just received telepathically is correct? No one has yet fathomed this mystery. But
Stevenson discovered ‘a feeling of conviction’ was one of the characteristics
that separated telepathic communications from ordinary dreams and anxious
imaginings.

There were two other factors that made
people sit up wide-eyed and reach for the phone or take other action. One was
if the person in the crisis specifically focused on the other person during the
moment of danger. This seemed particularly true of parents responding to
children.

The second factor was the possibility that the
person receiving the distress call had experienced previous psychic
communications — suggesting that some people just have a gift for this. Janey
Acker Hurth, for example, not only sensed her daughter’s (non-fatal) collision
with a car, but also her father’s sudden illness a few years earlier.

Back then, when she was newly married, she’d
awoken to ‘a feeling of deep sadness, an impression that something was wrong’.
The feeling intensified and she began to sob.

Then, when she was making breakfast, she cried:
‘It’s my father! Something is terribly wrong with my father!’ Her dad had gone
into a coma during the night and died shortly afterwards.

Stevenson was struck by how this type of
information sometimes gradually came into focus. People like Mrs Hurth, he
concluded, ‘may scan the environment for danger to her loved ones and, when
this is detected, tune in and bring more details to the surface of
consciousness’.

In the Eighties and Nineties, a British
neuropsychiatrist, Dr Peter Fenwick, of King’s College, London, appealed to the
public for cases of what he called ‘death-bed coincidences’, and amassed more
than 2,000 accounts.

Typically, one woman wrote to him about the
suicide of her husband, from whom she’d recently separated. She’d awoken at 3am
in 1989 from an intensely vivid dream in which her ex was sitting on the bed,
assuring her that he’d found peace.

‘I got up, did some work I needed to do and
two clients phoned me around 8am,’ she continued. ‘I freaked them out
completely as I told them I’d be taking some time out because my husband had
just died.’

She didn’t yet objectively know this to be
true. But when she let herself into her former husband’s flat, she discovered
his body.

In her case, the person in distress hadn’t
sought help — instead, he’d apparently sent a message of reassurance after his
death.

In other cases, people may be telepathically
sharing the calm and peace they feel as they die.
Stevenson concluded: ‘It’s altogether probable that important, unrecognised
exchanges of feelings through extrasensory processes are occurring all the
time. Even if we can only observe it occasionally — and usually between persons
united by love and during a special crisis — this should arouse our
curiosity.’

SHARED PAIN

On the evening his father died of lung
cancer, sailor Raymond Hunter felt as though his lungs were collapsing and he
could scarcely breathe.

‘I remember grabbing my mouth, forcing it
open to help me breathe. I was fighting for all I was worth, but the pains were
unbearable,’ he recalled afterwards.

Psychiatrist Ian Stevenson has suggested it
could be a kind of telepathic extension of a phenomenon in which people who
live together sympathetically take on one another’s symptoms or moods. But
that’s only a theory

Unbearable pain — now, that’s not something
you shake off as a strange dream. Particularly when you later discover that
your father died in that very moment.

This abrupt and violent experience of
another person’s dying symptoms has been noted by some researchers, though it
remains almost completely unexplored.

A particularly vivid instance involves a
woman in her late 30s.

‘I was awoken around 2am by the sound of my
heart breaking. I know that sounds really odd, but I heard it crack and felt my
chest sort of splitting,’ she recalled.

‘The next morning I got into the car to
drive to work. I was sitting at traffic lights when I felt this pressure on the
side of my face. I distinctly remember that the pressure was that of a cheek
lightly pressed against mine, sort of cuddling me.

‘The feeling I was filled with at this time
was one of love and support — it felt fine. I then felt a hand holding my hand
and felt it had no middle finger. And then it dawned on me.

‘It was my dad’s hand; he’d lost his finger
in a building site accident when I was a little girl.

‘I returned home after an hour to be met by
my husband’s words: “Your dad’s gone.” Apparently, he’d died from a massive
heart attack during the night. I wasn’t at all surprised.’

Why should the dying want to share such
agonies with the people they love? No one knows.

But one thing at least is clear: no one
in their right mind could dismiss these visions as wishful thinking.

RETURN OF THE DEAD

Two hundred miles above Earth, Jerry
Linenger was working on the space station Mir when he suddenly became
aware of the presence of his father.

It was 1997 — and his father had died seven
years earlier. A conversation ensued in which the older man spoke of his pride
that his son had realised his dream of travelling in space. Linenger was deeply
moved.

Later, however, he chose to interpret his
father’s presence as nothing more than a projection of his imagination. And
yet, at the time, he had derived great consolation from the encounter.
Nor was his experience by any means a strange aberration. In fact, it’s
estimated that around half of all bereaved people — in all cultures — at some
point register the presence of their departed loved one.

According to a study done in 2006, 84 per
cent of the bereaved were in good mental health at the time. And only
5 per cent found the encounter negative or distressing; for the
majority, it was profoundly comforting.

Visual perception of the presence seems to
be the rarest. In another study, only about 5 per cent actually saw the dead
person; about 15 per cent heard him or her; and the rest had partial
impressions, such as feeling hands on their head or noticing a distinct
presence in the room.

Unlike our conception of ghosts, these
presences can physically react with the material world.

The writer Nancy Coggeshall, for instance,
felt the presence of her partner twice while lying in bed, five months after he
died in 2002. ‘I felt someone lying down beside me, and I felt the impact of
[his] weight on the mattress. The second time, the pressure was so great, I
rolled over and asked: “Who’s there?” ’ she told me.

Karen Simons, who works in advertising,
recalled a similar experience in 1994, after her father, a farmer, died of a
heart attack.

‘After Dad’s death, I began driving his big,
old Ford Taurus,’ she told me. ‘It was comforting, in the way you hang on to
people’s shirts. But that’s all it was. Until about six weeks after he died.

‘It was a very cold night in January. I’m
driving on the highway and into the passenger seat comes Dad. I could feel him
settle in. He had a very distinctive lean to the left, because of the way his
back was.

‘Also, you know how you know the sound of
people’s breathing? How you can tell whether it’s your son or your daughter in
the room? It was Dad. He rode with me for about ten miles.

‘It was incredibly real and completely
transforming. I was almost giddy. I was hoping he’d stay.’

Karen never sensed his presence again. Her
father, she believed, had been saying a final goodbye.

Yet some loved ones can linger for years.
This continues to be the case with her aunt’s son, who drowned 35 years ago in
a fast-flowing river.

‘On a very regular basis, Allan comes and
sits on the end of her bed, and they have a conversation,’ Karen said. ‘ “And
don’t tell me I’m crazy!” my aunt always says.’

Back in 1917, Sigmund Freud labelled all
such visions and sensations as ‘hallucinatory wishful psychosis’ — and his
view remains popular in the medical profession. Since then,
however, a great deal more has become known about hallucinations.

People held in solitary confinement for a
long time, for example, are known to hallucinate. This takes the form of
random, often paranoid imagery, and it’s accompanied by agitation, panic
attacks and general mental disintegration.

But widows and widowers are clearly not in
this state when they see or sense their loved ones. Nor are they likely to be
alone for days on end in tiny windowless cells.

What about the theory that
sheer longing for someone could cause a hallucination? Unfortunately for
the sceptics, this falls at the first hurdle. Think of all those long-term
lovers who leave people heartbroken when they run off with someone else. No one
reports having visions of them.

In any case, the vision may not even be of
someone close to you. That was certainly the case when a lawyer — interviewed
by psychologist Erlendur Haraldsson in 2006 — had an unexpected encounter.

Throughout most of our history, everyone has
known that those who die can return as anything, from a sigh to a physical
presence. Our ancestors simply assumed the dead continued to watch, console,
guide and even meddle in their affairs

One day, as dawn was breaking, he was coming
home from a dance at which he hadn’t drunk any alcohol. While he was walking
over a hill, ‘a woman came towards me, kind of stooping, with a shawl over her
head.

‘I didn’t pay any attention to her,
but as she passed I said “Good morning” or something like that. She
didn’t say anything.

‘Then I noticed she was following me. When I
stopped, she also stopped. I started saying my prayers in my mind to calm
myself. When I came close to home, she disappeared.’

But had she? The lawyer’s brother, who was
awake, greeted him with the words: ‘What is this old woman doing here? Why is
this old woman with you?’

The brothers lived with their father, who
worked at the local psychiatric hospital. A few hours later, they were told by
him that a patient at the hospital had just died.

When the brothers investigated further, they
found out that she exactly fitted their description of the old woman.

Clearly, whatever had caused the woman to
materialise after her death had nothing to do with the lawyer suffering
from isolation. Nor had he been longing to see her.

Yet, bizarre as it was, his experience would
not have amazed our ancestors.

Throughout most of our history, everyone has
known that those who die can return as anything, from a sigh to a physical
presence. Our ancestors simply assumed the dead continued to watch, console,
guide and even meddle in their affairs.

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About Me

Jan 2015 - 3 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO rigorously described, September 2010 I am pleased to report that my essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS' has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) and appeared in their June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in relativity,as well as differential geometry(pure math) and of course analysis. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled 'Paradigms Shift'. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data and record impressions and interpretations on material read. Do join my blog and receive Four items of interest daily Monday through Saturday.